Monthly Archives: July 2016

When Orion’s dog, Sirius, rises at dawn, we all begin panting. Homer — not Simpson but the ancient Greek poet — beautifully described the phenomenon in the Iliad: Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky On summer nights, star of stars, Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest Of all, but an evil portent, bringing […]

Nearly two hundred years flowed by between sightings of Atlantic salmon, salmo salar, in the Androscoggin River. A lone salmon was noted in 1816, then for a long time there were only scattered sightings, a fish here and a fish there. The King of Fish was defeated by dams and discouraged by toxic pollution and […]

One day about 20 years ago I caught a beautiful twenty-inch male brook trout in XXXXXXXX Pond. The Bro was there with me. We had often fished that fly-fishing-only pond, which is a 20-minute hike off a logging road, and had caught many a trout there, usually in the nine-to-twelve-inch range. In the late afternoon of […]

My old friend Chris Nation, a Brit who exited Britain for Spain a short while before the historic and troubling vote on Brexit, wrote to say he had read about 40-pound trout being winched out of some lake in the U.S. They were almost certain to be lake trout, Salvelinus Namaycush, and were caught either […]

Let’s get one thing straight: the Brook Trout, salvelinus fontinalis, is the most beautiful fish on the planet. I’ve believed that ever since catching my first one, on a worm, in a shady pool of the Oyster River at the edge of the Bog, off Beechwood Street in Warren. The worm had been liberated from […]